The commanding heights
The political polarization of America has never been more evident than in the weeks since Nov. 8; amid the respective jubilation and despair, it seems that conservatives and liberals inhabit the same country only in a purely geographical sense.
The conventional wisdom pits rural “clingers” versus urban sophisticates, “flyover country” against the east and west coasts, and working-class white folks against establishment elites.
Underlying all of this is, however, a more meaningful division: the friction between what Auberon Waugh called the “chattering classes,” overwhelmingly on the left; and ordinary Americans, mostly on the center-right. Wikipedia defines “the chattering classes” as “a politically active, socially concerned and highly educated section of the ‘metropolitan middle class,’ especially those with political, media, and academic connections.”
The late political scientist James Q. Wilson used a different term, the “new class,” to describe a group that “live in big cities, have jobs that involve manipulating symbols (writers, actors, reporters, teachers), rarely attend religious services, have liberal views, and vote Democratic.” Wilson contrasted this new class with the “traditional middle class,” which “live in small towns or suburbs, have jobs in business or farming, often attend religious services, have conservative views, and vote Republican.”
Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of contemporary American politics because so remarkably incongruous is the extent to which our left-leaning chattering classes thoroughly control the most crucial “opinion forming” institutions in a nation where conservatives have long outnumbered liberals.
The first step in understanding the left’s continuing competitiveness in a center-right country—to the point of the Democratic Party having now won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential contests—is to thus recognize the extent to which it dominates academe, the mass media, Hollywood, the arts, the publishing industry, and our grant-dispensing foundations.
To borrow and in some respects invert a concept from Karl Marx, such bastions of leftism constitute an intellectual “superstructure” sitting uneasily atop and fiercely at odds with a bourgeois “base.”
Members of the chattering classes exercise political influence vastly beyond their numbers because they are much more intensely political and ideologically aware than ordinary Americans, as well as in positions that can be used to call attention to liberal grievances and causes.
Academe is probably most important for the left among these institutional bastions because both the degree of control and leftward tilt is greater than in the others.
Such dominance also matters more than it used to because far more young people now attend institutions of higher education and are therefore politically socialized at an impressionable time in their lives by deep immersion in the latest leftist dogmas. That indoctrination might fade some over time, as cost-free youthful idealism is replaced by the realism of marriage, kids and mortgages, but the left still gets to restock ideologically with each incoming cohort.
Most of the fashionable tropes of leftism now originate on college campuses and the left’s hold on such institutions is more reliable because it’s largely impregnable—despite their dreary, formulaic leftism, both Hollywood and the mass media, for instance, remain essentially commercial enterprises and must therefore remain cognizant of what actually “sells” in a capitalist marketplace.
For academe, not so much—ideas flow mostly in an outward direction from our ivory towers to infect the rest of society, with the professoriate and a burgeoning college-administrator class largely insulated from commercial and other external pressures, at least in terms of the ideological content of their curricula.
Trustees, alumni, donors, and parents either appear content with the idea of the academy as a monolithic font of leftist ideas, or, more likely, are largely oblivious of the extent to which it has become one. Either way, the end result is an unhealthy ideological conformity and insulation from competing ideas, including those held by the majority of the nation’s citizenry.
The speech codes, shouting down (or dis-inviting) of non-leftist speakers and the refusal to permit reasoned debate on crucial issues on so many of our college campuses suggests that tolerance actually means tolerance only of left dogma and that all the gibberish about diversity is simply a ruse to conceal that most important expression of it—the diversity of ideas.
The carving out of “safe spaces” and the endless scanning for “microaggressions” may seem absurd to the point of self-parody to the rest of us, but also reflects a concerted effort to control discourse by excluding any ideas or facts that challenge leftist orthodoxy.
On a purely superficial level, America still seems a fairly conservative place, as the presumed vehicle of conservatism, the Republican Party, controls the overwhelming majority of elected offices nationwide, from state legislatures and governors’ mansions up to Congress and, now, the presidency.
But the liberal left still sets the broader agenda because it controls to an even greater extent and with far more determination something more important—the broader culture in which our political ideas develop.